There was again no response, nor to a letter Chertkov wrote in July 1934, by which time he was so ill he was no longer in full control of his faculties, but in August that year the money started to trickle through at last.
Lenin had supposedly expressly stipulated that the edition should include everything ever written by Tolstoy, without any changes, and should restore cuts made by tsarist censors. His word was law, but the Stalinist government soon realised how subversive some of the material was. There was indeed a good deal of criticism by Tolstoy of the revolutionary movement in his late writings, and Chertkov, as chief editor, came in for criticism himself now from the Bolsheviks for not compiling the commentaries to Tolstoy’s texts from a Marxist point of view.91 Chertkov, of course, ever the aristocrat like Tolstoy, had never deigned to pay obeisance to contemptible Bolshevik ideology, and his persistently apolitical stance is all the more remarkable – and brave – given the militant rhetoric and coercive policies of the times. The Soviet government certainly came to regret giving Chertkov so much autonomy.
The great irony of the Tolstoy Jubilee Edition was that it made Tolstoy’s works no more accessible than they had been during his lifetime. Not only was each volume extremely expensive, as Alexandra feared, but the print run was tiny: 5,000 or at the most 10,000. By the time that Nikolay Rodionov took over as chief editor when Chertkov died in 1936 at the age of eighty-two (the same age that Tolstoy had been when he died), seventy-two volumes were ready to be printed, but only twenty-nine had been published. They were appearing, moreover, in a strange order. Volume fifty-nine was published in 1935, for example, but it would not be until 1952 that volume thirty-four was published.92 Eight volumes appeared in 1937, the year after Chertkov died, but this was the height of the purges, and Solomon Lozovsky, the new head of the state publishing house, now restyled as the acronym Goslitizdat, literally feared for his life. He had been appointed in 1936, having already been arrested once on Stalin’s orders. The editorial team, whose office by a strange quirk of fate was located near the Lubyanka, now lost its independence, and were forced to take orders from Goslitizdat. In such fearful times there was no chance that Lozovsky could even contemplate approving the volumes in the Jubilee Edition which included Tolstoy’s principal religious writings (volumes 23, 28, 48, 49, for example).
Between 1939 and 1949 publication ground to a complete halt, with staff working without a salary and Rodionov courageously seeking new ways to continue by trying to play the apparatchiks at their own game, and by emphasising Lenin’s imprimatur on the whole enterprise. In the late thirties, under constant threat of arrest, the team doggedly prepared for publication more innocuous volumes, such as those containing Tolstoy’s correspondence to his wife (83, 84), and they flagged up quotations by Lenin at the expense of their own commentary. The Tolstoy scholar Inessa Medzhibovskaya is right to liken Rodionov’s dealings with Soviet bureaucracy during the purges to the literature of the absurd. In her review of a book published in 2002 by Lev Osterman, which has been one of the many important post-Soviet sources to explode the myth of Tolstoy’s hallowed status after 1917, she gives an amusing abridged version of the transcript Osterman provides of Rodionov’s encounter in 1939 with Pyotr Pospelov, deputy head of the Propaganda and Agitation department of the Central Committee:
RODIONOV: I have been so insistently trying to gain a chance to see you in order to seek your advice, receive your guidance for action as to how we may resolve this painful situation without violating the will of L. N. Tolstoy and, at the same time, act in accordance with the current guidelines that the Central Committee of the Party has in mind.
POSPELOV: You have committed serious errors. The first one is your lengthy commentaries. Tolstoy’s Complete Works are replaced with the complete works of his commentators. The second error is your method of commentary. You do not observe the contract and the contract stresses the need to be objective. Yet who could be more objective than Lenin? Why don’t you enlist this most objective of sources? Why do you write long biographies about the most insignificant people, even about those who ended up being counter-revolutionary?93
The Jubilee Edition was only properly resuscitated after Stalin’s death in 1953. The last volumes were eventually all published by 1958, by which time the heroic scholars of the original editorial team had been relegated to assistant status by Goslitizdat, and the names of Chertkov and Alexandra Tolstaya were no longer mentioned on the masthead. It had taken thirty years. The scholarship in the volumes published later inevitably suffered, and fresh rounds of ‘editing’ were so drastic that some volumes had to double up with others. The much-touted total of ninety volumes, in fact, comprises only seventy-eight separate books.94 Once Tolstoy’s religious works had appeared in the Jubilee Edition, they were banned from future publication. Nevertheless, in the ‘official’ history of the publication of the Jubilee Edition which Rodionov published in 1961, he could with justification point to it being compared to the 143 volumes of the benchmark Weimar Goethe edition, despite the necessary political accommodation with the regime.95 Forty years later, in a very different political climate, Osterman’s book Srazhenie za Tolstogo (The Battle for Tolstoy) would reveal the true story behind the publication of this extraordinary edition.
Over the course of the first few decades of Soviet power, Tolstoy was successfully transformed by the Bolsheviks from a ‘socially alien’ writer into one whose name was ‘synonymous with Russia herself ’, as has been pointed out by Alexander Fodor in a valuable book which explores the history of Russia’s relationship with Tolstoy.96 A key role in this process of transformation was played by World War II. during the celebrations to mark the October Revolution in besieged Leningrad in 1941, Tolstoy’s stories about the defence of Sebastopol were broadcast via loudspeaker in Palace Square. War and Peace also became a vitally important work while Russians fought to defend their country from the Nazi invasion. By this time, twenty-five trunks from the archive at the Tolstoy Museum in Moscow had been evacuated to Tomsk in Siberia, with other precious items directed to Tashkent. Tomsk was also the destination for the most valuable exhibits at Yasnaya Polyana, which was invaded by the Nazis on 30 October 1941, two days after the last party of tourists had been shown round its empty rooms.97
By the time the war was over, Tolstoy’s entire corpus of anti-war writings had quietly been forgotten. In the 1950s Tolstoy was firmly entrenched in the Soviet imagination as a symbol of Russia, and as her most ardent patriot. Generations of Russian schoolchildren now grew up with the officially approved novels and stories that had become a fixture on the national curriculum, completely unaware of Tolstoy’s enormous legacy of religious and political writings. Tolstoy’s ‘official’ status was cemented by the number of new streets named after him in cities across the country, from Penza to Vladivostok, and in time his legacy was also tainted by the exigencies of the command economy which bred corruption and cynicism. Like all major Soviet literary museums, the Tolstoy Museum in Moscow was founded to be a centre for cutting-edge scholarship as much as a tourist destination, and it had been initially placed under the jurisdiction of the Academy of Sciences, along with the Tolstoy estate-museum. In 1953, however, that jurisdiction passed to the Soviet Ministry of Culture, and three years later there was a further ‘demotion’ to the Ministry of Culture of the Russian Federation, which placed more emphasis on meeting targets for visitor numbers. Scholars battled on valiantly, already hampered by the Soviet censorship, but standards inevitably slipped in some areas.98